


The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine

by luninosity



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Birthday Party, Bubble Bath, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Caning, Cock Rings, Consent Issues, Explicit Sexual Content, Forced Orgasm, HYDRA Trash Party, Happy Ending, Identity Issues, M/M, Nightmares, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Rape/Non-con Elements, Revelations, Self-Acceptance, as in bucky asleep and not realizing it, unintentional self-harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-21
Packaged: 2018-03-30 06:52:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3927055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony tells him they’re planning a party for Steve’s birthday. He knows how parties are supposed to go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one month's warning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Feanor_in_leather_pants](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feanor_in_leather_pants/gifts).
  * Translation into 中文 available: [The Tones That Tremble Down Your Spine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3992968) by [ogawaryoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ogawaryoko/pseuds/ogawaryoko)



> For feanor and [that lovely and seriously NSFW Hydra Trash Party art of the caning](http://feanorinleatherpants.tumblr.com/post/117237722965/every-time-i-set-pen-to-paper-my-level-of).
> 
>  **Warnings for this chapter:** Bucky having vague memories of non-con and abuse, not too explicit yet; mention of possible self-harm (Bucky’s standing on a rooftop, but he’s not going to jump, even if the idea’s brought up), consent issues (Tony brings up having a party, Bucky assumes this means the same as a Hydra Trash Party, and it never occurs to him to say no). Chapter two will be the worst of it, as Bucky remembers one of those party nights in detail.
> 
> As ever, characters belong to Marvel, not me; no harm intended. 
> 
> Title from Of Monsters and Men’s “Crystals,” which in my head is a Bucky song.

He is standing on the roof of the Tower when Tony Stark finds him. He is standing still with bare feet drinking in the silvery flatness of metal and the neon sounds of New York night in his ears. He turns when Stark steps out the door; he could’ve turned earlier, hearing the approach on the stairs, but he has learned that Steve’s teammates flinch when he reacts like the weapon and not the man.  
  
“Hey.” Stark ambles across the rooftop toward him. No suit, battered loose clothing, no visible threat, easy to dismiss. The man who goes by Bucky Barnes’ name knows better than to do so. Stark’s eyes hold too much pain and too much cleverness and too much need to make things right.   
  
Stark holds out a bag. “Want a blueberry? And also maybe we could talk about why you and I are on the roof and your supersoldier hot water bottle’s downstairs in bed. He’s still asleep, I asked Jarvis, and that part makes sense, he got banged up pretty bad by the Hydra death goons yesterday, but what doesn’t make sense is the part where we’re awake and on the roof, so. Your turn.”  
  
He takes a blueberry. This is tactical. Most people, consciously or not, will relax a hairsbreadth among those with whom they’ve shared food.   
  
Also, he can’t recall the taste of blueberries. Might as well try.  
  
“I like New York,” Stark says, crossing his arms. “I know why I like New York. Food. People. Life. Politicians to insult. The ability to leave and go back to Malibu, that’s a big part of why I like New York, what about you?”  
  
The berry bursts in ripe tart flavor over his tongue. He wonders whether this is what the color blue tastes like. Do colors have a flavor? It’s not impossible that they do. He wouldn’t know.  
  
“You like him,” Stark says, offering the bag again.  
  
In a conscious effort that is not a lie for being so, he offers up information, offers, “Yes,” in return.  
  
“Aha, it does talk, it doesn’t just eat my blueberries and stand around on my rooftop, and I’m pretty sure you’re not actually thinking what Steve’s going to think you’re thinking, but I don’t know what you’re thinking and I hate not knowing things.”  
  
“I like him.”  
  
“And you don’t want to hurt him.”  
  
“And I don’t know the…correct operating protocol.”  
  
“I literally cannot believe I am saying this—” Tony tosses a blueberry into his mouth. “—but people don’t come with operating protocols. Pepper’d be so proud. I’m maturing. Catch.”  
  
He calculates rapidly, determines appropriate force, traps the flying berry between two metal fingers with zero spillage of juice or crushed sides. “I do. Did.”  
  
“So you’re people. If you’re using that argument.”  
  
“I’m not—I didn’t mean—” Giving up: “Fuck you, Stark.”  
  
“Only people get to swear at me. Speaking of, did you know how much Captain America can swear? Because when he thinks we’re not being recorded and transmitted around the world, when he’s not being all public-image role-model hero, he knows some words that even _I_ —”  
  
“I learned them from him. Twice.” He watches a streak of light flash down a city avenue. An ambulance, siren wailing through the night like a woeful banshee. “I wasn’t going to jump.”  
  
“I know you weren’t.” Tony flicks another berry at him. “One for me, one for you. He loves you, I know you understand me, and also, hey, his birthday’s in a month and we’re going to have a party, thought you’d want to know.”  
  
A party. The night’s abruptly colder. He’s aware that this is psychosomatic, aware that the spike-toothed bite of breeze against bare toes is not suddenly sharper because of the word. Nevertheless, against all rationality, it _is_.  
  
“Thought you’d want advance notice.” Tony proffers the whole bag this time. “Time to prepare, time to get used to lots of people making lots of noise and drinking lots of very expensive alcohol, time to get used to people period, whatever you need.” His eyes are dark and expressive, shadowed and kind. Tony Stark is being generous. The man who might sometimes on good days think he can be Bucky Barnes understands as much.  
  
Tony _is_ being kind, and generous, and more aware of operating protocols than Steve Rogers, for all Steve’s openhearted fiercely loyal love, will ever be. Tony plainly knows that Steve is not prepared for a party, has no equipment and no comprehension of the requirements of such; Tony is ensuring, by imparting this information, that the man who loves Steve Rogers will go to any lengths to acquire the necessary items— _whatever he needs_ —for a successful event.  
  
A party. In honor of Captain America’s birthday. Thunder mutters dourly in the humid middle distance: out at sea, not wanting any part of anyplace nearer.  
  
So. He has been informed. He will think nothing of the slight tremor in his right hand, his weaker hand. He will pretend that he does not want another blueberry. He will want to be in flawless shape, to be good for Steve, and he _does_ want to be good for Steve, and that is real.  
  
He says “Thank you” because this is a thing that people say when someone else’s done them a favor. He does mean it.  
  
Stark begins to speak, stops, shakes his head.   
  
They stand in silence under the nighttime sky, under the pulsing reflected gleam of the vibrant living metropolis below, under light and life bouncing recklessly up into summer-sticky clouds. The air tastes like oncoming rain and slick metal and smoke and city clamor. The flavor of blueberries dissipates, but slowly.  
  
Tony Stark says, “It gets easier. I mean, not easy, and I don’t know what you’ve—I mean whatever I’ve been through it’s not what you—but some of it—it gets easier. I promise you it does.”  
  
He says nothing. What can he say? He doesn’t know what easy is; easier, the comparative, is impossible to measure. Though maybe it isn’t: it is, he thinks, blackly amused, _easier_ to say nothing than it is to unearth words.  
  
“Take it or don’t,” Stark goes on, brushing momentary vulnerability aside, “but there’s a national icon about to wake up alone in your bed and you might want to get down there because if he tears my tower apart like a log of firewood looking for you, it’s coming out of your back pay, Sergeant, and have you seen what that man can _do_ to defenseless kindling, because I have,” and then wanders back through the door while continuing to talk, evidently to himself, about mechanized log-splitters and some sort of competition.  
  
A party for Captain America’s birthday. Well. Not as if he’s not done it before.  
  
He’ll have to purchase some items. He imagines that the set-up will be different, given the altered parameters. He is unsure what Steve will desire; he’s never had Steve present in person for one of these events. Only a photograph, a banner, a promotional film playing while men and women laughed and forced his head up and made him look at Steve’s two-dimensional eyes, while they—  
  
He will do whatever Steve desires. That’s not in question.   
  
Every year—he knows it’s every year via records of cryofreeze and thawing, as well as extrapolation from scattered thistledown memories—Hydra’d thrown a party. Every year, on Captain America’s birthday. Must be tradition here at the Tower as well; of course it is, they’ve got more reason to celebrate, having the actual tangible Steve Rogers.   
  
He remembers Alexander Pierce’s hands. He remembers—  
  
Methodically, as the storm closes in, he begins a list. Some items will not be difficult; some they already possess. Others are more specialized, but nothing he cannot acquire at a certain type of shop. A few he may not be able to recreate; he suspects they involved unique Hydra-laboratory inventions and experimentation. He will do the best he can. Steve will not fault him for failing if he’s done the best he can, he’s sure. Steve Rogers is a good man.  
  
He will need to find restraints that can hold him, first and foremost. And one more item, one that he recalls having been popular among party attendees. He will need to find a cane.   
  
When he turns, aware that he’s been away from Steve’s bedside too long, his foot bumps an object on the rooftop. He looks down.  
  
The bag of blueberries. Sitting innocuously at his feet. Open.  
  
He’d not noticed Stark leaving them. That is…  
  
…a flaw. A fault. Distracted. He must have been more disoriented by the news than he’d realized. He dislikes this idea.  
  
He is aware that dislike is an emotion; and he picks up the blueberries, tossing the bag from one hand to the other, thoughtfully.  
  
When he slides back into bed, Steve’s emerging groggily from folds of clinging satin sheets, sleepy half-pained gaze searching the room. “Buck—?”  
  
“I’m here.” He holds out the bag. “Have a blueberry.”  
  
“You…went out for—were you talking to Tony, because I’m fine, he worries like six fuckin’ mother hens at once—”  
  
“You tried to get yourself trampled by a _tank_. A tank with enhanced energy projectile weapons, Steve.”  
  
“Only a _little_ trampled,” Steve grumbles defensively, “you had my back,” and Bucky—who right now _is_ Bucky, all the fragments of him agreeing on _that_ reaction—retorts, “Yeah, I always do, but why’ve you gotta make my job so goddamn _hard_ , Stevie, seriously,” which makes Steve laugh and tell him he’s just being lazy, wow, Buck, guess that hasn’t changed…  
  
“Yes sir Captain America sir,” Bucky says, “and fuck you and your patriotic tights and dance routine training, sir,” and Steve gets that _very_ specific glint in his eyes and promptly pounces.  
  
Decadent satin sheets, it turns out, do not combine well with magnificently crushed blueberries and purple juice. This is, however, a moot point, as they also manage to break the legs off the bed. A third time.  
  
Steve sleeps again in the crumpled happy disaster of pillow-fluff and slanted mattress, plainly not caring that they’re at a forty-five-degree angle as long as he can throw an arm over Bucky. Bucky lies beside that bruised ferocious devoted heat, letting the sensation of Steve soak into his bones, noting idly the blueberry stains on Steve’s ass and his own arm and, improbably, the ceiling. The rain arrives belatedly to patter across the windowpanes and tumble from building-corners and eaves.  
  
He closes his eyes. He doesn’t need to see. Morning’s coming soon. The sun’ll be rising, and the rain won’t last. A new day and dewdrops and kitten-whisker clouds and Steve’s eyelashes outlined in gold. One more day.  
  
One _less_ day. He counts. Twenty-eight. Until Steve’s birthday. Until the party.  
  
He will have to be efficient. Perhaps he will start by seeking out the clearest memory from the last party he recalls: the memory of the smooth polished cruelly elegant length of a cane.


	2. one week to go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky, while dreaming, remembers one of those party nights. In detail.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the worst--as in most explicit--chapter. (In the next chapter Steve gets to find out what Bucky thinks a party is. Which may be emotionally worse.)
> 
>  **Warnings for** : non-consensual sex (as in, Bucky's incapable of consent; from his POV this is right and acceptable); caning, dildos and sex toys, alcohol, forced orgasms, lots of Hydra playing with Bucky's body; plus minor self-harm when Bucky wakes up from the dream (not suicidal in any way, just his need to feel some kind of sensation).
> 
> Alexander Pierce is a bastard.

A week out from the party, he is dreaming.   
  
He knows somewhere back in his rational mind that the dream-world is unreal: that his tangible body lies tucked under Steve Rogers’ strong right arm, pulled close against Steve’s heat, cradled by their brand-new bed and velvet dark. He knows but he cannot wake.  
  
He knows that Steve should never never never have to see this dream, and so he does not want to wake.  
  
He considers this thought, standing inside his head _(on what? where?)_ with eyes closed _(what eyes?)_ in darkness as his dream-self shudders and breaks and makes a sound at last. The thought is wrong. If a party is to happen, then Steve must know. Steve must expect this of him. Steve does not like to think about other people touching him, however; he tries to make sense of this contradiction for a while.  
  
In his head someone’s crying.  
  
Steve does expect this of him, but must be too kindhearted, too in love, to want to think about the training behind the end result. That makes a certain amount of sense.  
  
The crying dwindles into quiet hopeless sobs, jagged and small. Like a child hurt, uncomprehending, unrescued.  
  
To be good for Steve he will need to remember.   
  
He opens his eyes—in his head, only in his head—and faces the dream. The naked body, bent over the railing. The bruises and blood and dried bodily fluids stuck to skin. The implements, and the laughter.  
  
The body does not protest. It has forgotten how.  
  
He takes a step forward. And forward, and he is that body, because that body is him.  
  
And he dreams.  
  
  
The party’s loud and raucous, tipsy spiraling music and sloshing bourbon and fanciful clothes. Some participants are masked, great elaborate butterfly-wings or tiger-stripes concealing their identities even now; some go free and open, reveling in their own debauchery. Hydra letting their hair down. Celebrating. Honoring the good Captain America’s birthday. The man without whom, the research that’s done so much, the spirited motivation of having a patriotic rival, et cetera.   
  
Tonight they’ve rented out a New Orleans mansion, and the sultry sweet scents of magnolias and peaches bloom alongside sticky summer heat and body-sweat and alcohol. He has been told that this mansion once belonged to an infamous murderess. The man who told him this had snickered, forcing a cock further into his backside, joking about torture equipment and slaves kept in the attic and chains: _maybe you’d like chains, maybe you’d enjoy that, kinda fitting, wonder if any of that stuff’s left up there?_  
  
He had heard the words, but they meant nothing. Additional data, but irrelevant for present use: he will do as they demand regardless of history or location or chains. Chains have been in play before.  
  
The man had laughed, pumping away; had stiffened, perhaps at the thought of torture, and grunted. The body bent over the railing felt the hot pulses as the man spent himself, adding to the surfeit already there. The man had laughed again, pulling away. The body felt warm globs ooze out of his overstuffed orifice and slip down his thighs. The body did not move. He does not move now.  
  
He is folded in two over an intricate iron railing on a low indoor ballroom balcony, flowery and antique. The bar of the iron presses into his stomach, though that is a small hurt and unworthy of notice. He is handcuffed—special cuffs, they’d grinned, ordered just for him—and kept with legs spread, head down: on display, submissive, available. The party centerpiece, awaiting decoration.  
  
A couple wanders by, a man and a woman. She is masked, he is not, they both are inebriated though not yet sloppily drunk, and excited. He listens as their words float over him: _look at that, God we do good work, he doesn’t even care, not even fighting those handcuffs, bet we could do anything—_  
  
The woman giggles. She steps closer and giggles again, nervous, and touches the body’s hip, almost shy. He does not react. This is the mission: what he’s designed for.  
  
Emboldened by the lack of deadly assassination-related response, she slides a hand along his thighs. _Between_ his thighs, and up to his cock, hanging stiff and flushed dark in its ring. He’d been given an injection before the night’s beginning. Some guests would like to enjoy that part of him. Some have already. He has not been allowed to come. The ache is constant throbbing thunder beneath his skin, centered in darkened balls, quivering at the tip of his cock. When she strokes his oversensitive shaft, he wants to push into her hand to whine to scream to come, because the curious touch is too light and too kind and too brilliant, but he is not permitted to want.   
  
He is here to be used. The parameters of the party.   
  
She rakes a fingernail across the weeping slit at the tip of his cock. He cannot control the trickle of fluid that follows, unbidden. “Oh,” she says, “you poor thing,” and pats his shaft, making it bob. Her companion sighs, impatient, and grabs her hand, and yanks her away. They leave accompanied by the sounds of messy drunken kisses. He loses some time then, drifting on waves of sharp-edged light.  
  
A crack shoves him down into the waves. They cut like knives, like sound through air. He needs a moment to realize that the sound was a spank and the spank connected with his own flesh. His ass burns. The spanks do not cease; the man behind him calls him “boy” and “slut” and asks him how he likes this feeling. He does not know the answer, but he is not required to; the man steps to his side, grabs his hair, jerks his head up. Orders him to look down from the balcony at the ballroom below. At the opposite wall, where—  
  
_(no no no someone’s saying no someone’s begging pleading swearing)_  
  
—where the Captain America Birthday Display is in full swing. Black and white serial videos. Splashes of old comics projected in garish color on the wall. Newer photos and video: Steve Rogers jogging, visiting a children’s hospital, fighting improbable aliens on New York streets. Steve Rogers removing his helmet and running a hand through sweaty hair but smiling for a camera when a little girl wants a picture with her savior.  
  
Blond hair blue eyes grieving stubborn lonely smile. Fair skin and broad shoulders that square up heroically but slump when no one’s watching.  
  
_(no no please)_  
  
“Bet he’d love this,” the man at his side muses conversationally. “Seein’ everything you do for us, how happy you keep us, bet it’d just make his goddamn day. He never needed you, you know that, never even went back for your body. He knows exactly what you’re worth. ’Course, you don’t know any of this, you don’t even know who he is.”  
  
He doesn’t know anything.  
  
“Look at him.” The hand’s relentless in his hair. “You like that, right? Looking at him. We know all about you, son. Those desires. Deviant, queer, _filthy_. You never told him. You knew you never could. You know you’re a good little cockslut, you always were, just like you are now, all filled up with us and still hard and begging for more.” A hand wraps around his cock; squeezes, impersonal and cruel. Steve Rogers’ two-dimensional eyes smile at a distant camera under dusty sunshine.  
  
“You’re _our_ whore,” the man tells him. He has no reason to disagree. “Ours. And you kill when we say and you come when we say and you’re gonna come from me spanking you, just like this…” The man’s breathing gets rougher: excited, raspy, swift. The hand leaves his cock and comes down across his ass again and again and again, no pauses in between. The body, bent over the railing, fights to not react, to take it. He’s here to be used. To feel his ass grow hotter and redder, fire along nerves and under skin, burning burning burning, and yet it’s right, he is their whore, and this is what he’s made for, designed for. Good for. _Good_.  
  
His cock twitches, shamefully dripping slow pearls of pre-come to the floor.  
  
The hand in his hair pulls his head up again. Makes him look at Captain America. “You don’t even know him, do you? Tell me.”  
  
That is a direct command. “No.”  
  
_(but he does)_  
  
_(or he doesn’t)_  
  
_(or if he doesn’t why do sparks flare to life someplace inside when he looks at blue eyes)_  
  
“Good little soldier,” the man purrs, “good little whore, come for me, that’s an order,” and he wants to protest that he cannot because of the cock-ring and the pain, but that _is_ an order and the hand’s spanking wildly against his ass, centered over his well-used puffy reddened hole, and Steve Rogers’ eyes are watching him, and something inside him—  
  
—breaks and crests, oblique and blinding, and it’s not like coming or maybe it is, maybe it’s the best crystalline agony he’s ever felt, and his legs give way as he sobs, just once—  
  
The man pulls out his own cock—the movement’s obvious, telegraphed by sound—and jerks himself off, hard and fast. Ropes of come land across the body’s scorched buttocks, scratched back, leaking orifice.   
  
The man pats him on the thigh, affirms, “Good boy,” and wanders off.  
  
The body, hanging broken across iron vines, trembles. His cock’s impossibly fat and rigid, so full it no longer feels a part of him: a heavy inhuman rod between his thighs. His backside glows like a sea of dull coals. He heals too quickly; numbness will never set in.  
  
He remains in place. He is a good soldier. A good boy. Given this mission.  
  
Other men and women meander over. They fuck him or taunt him or beat him senseless or all of the above, as they wish; this night is for them. Many of them fear the Winter Soldier, who after all might be ordered to kill potential internal threats as easily as external ones, with no compunction. Many of them have scientific curiosity and a particular disregard for standard ethical codes, hence their home here. They are all human.  
  
Some of them use the provided toys. A whip, a riding crop, a paddle: old standards, ones he thinks he recalls. Hydra is selective in memory deletion. He will not remember the occasion or the purpose of celebration or the location; he will keep the pain and the knowledge that he is here to be used. Besides the classic implements, dildos and vibrators proliferate tonight; one sizzles with electricity and makes him scream as it crackles across some spot inside him. He does not remember the next few moments, but when he comes to he tastes blood and semen in his mouth. He has bitten his lip; he has ejaculated involuntarily, enough that splashes landed on his face where he’s bent in two.   
  
The group behind him—scientists, perhaps—make thoughtful evaluatory noises. They try that one again. And again. And again. Verifying results.  
  
Some of them slip fingers inside him, teasing him that way. Some of them take him with cocks and strap-ons, and his hole grows so loose and stretched he wonders vaguely whether he’ll ever be able to tighten up again, whether this is too much even for this body, he’ll stay open and gaping and sloppy with come, everything they put in simply sliding right back out, for the rest of his life…  
  
He knows he’ll heal.  
  
One group of scientists has brought a machine. It is self-powered and inexorable. It jabs itself inside him and cups his cock and pumps, back and forth, back and forth, in him and around him. He finds himself rocking into it, mindlessly. His body seems to peacefully coil up and then unfurl, releasing a stream of come that pours out steadily. He does not think this is an orgasm, but he does not know what it is; he’s suspended somewhere in a dazed twilight as the pistons work in tandem. Eventually they take this machine away.  
  
One of the dildos is too large. It is deliberately so, monstrous and inhuman. Someone forces him open with it, and he feels himself tear, blood joining other fluids messily trailing down his legs. He _will_ heal. They know this and he knows this and they fuck him with the monstrous thing to see if he’ll respond, if he’ll come when ordered, when they shove the toy in and out of his channel with slick slurping sounds, hammering into his prostate.   
  
He does come. On command.   
  
They leave him alone for a time after that. Talking in awed voices.  
  
He drifts. He closes his eyes, hiding in black. Not looking at the face of Steve Rogers, Captain America.  
  
Someone, amused, says that he should join the party, and feeds him celebratory supersoldier birthday cake, shoving a forkful between his lips. The cake is too sweet and the icing is grainy. It tastes of flavors he does not recognize.  
  
Someone else asks whether he’d like a drink, and upends a full bottle of vodka over his split-apart spread-open hole. The pain of alcohol on raw torn flesh is unspeakable, though he has not been given permission to speak regardless. The vodka should not be enough to affect him, even poured directly into his body this way—those experiments have been done in the lab, testing operational capacity when impaired, and while he has no memory of the specific tests he knows the data on his own capabilities. But he is dizzy and thirsty and he has not been fed and blood’s pooling in his head, the way he’s tied upside down.  
  
He welcomes the lightheaded cloud-insulated sensation. It will depart too soon.  
  
Jokes flit through the air like the scent of magnolia blossoms and over-ripe fruit: _so nice of the Secretary, oh yeah once a year he actually shares his favorite toy, hey don’t complain you got to fuck him twice—_  
  
“All of you,” says a voice, kindly as an elder statesman regarding a junior flock, “having fun?”   
  
The voices murmur, indistinct, obsequious.   
  
A hand caresses his body. Long smooth strokes, shoulder to hip. “Look at me,” Alexander Pierce requests.  
  
He tries. He twists his head and tries. The angle is wrong, but he must do well enough, because the next caress is to his lips, a gentle thumb skimming the corner of his mouth.   
  
Alexander Pierce touches him in ways that—that no else ever does. A hand on a shoulder, an encouraging lift of his chin, a deep grave compassionate sorrow even when chastising him: _you must shape the world for us, you must be what we need, if I correct you it is only to make you stronger…_  
  
He has not wept throughout the party. He will now if Alexander Pierce requires it.  
  
Alexander Pierce has fading blond hair, and crumpled-paper fair skin, and blue eyes.  
  
“Sometimes,” that carved-granite voice decrees, benevolent as a patriarch, incontestable as a commandment, “we must explore a lack of mercy, to properly comprehend the value of the quality. We need you to help us do so. Do you understand?”  
  
No. But that is not the correct reply; he knows this protocol. “Yes.”  
  
“My good boy,” the Secretary praises, and the body quivers. “We will begin.”  
  
The item chosen for tonight’s demonstration, the party centerpiece, is the cane. He knows it is the cane because Pierce kneels down—stiffly, slowly, and Hydra technicians move as if to assist him, and the body wants to cry out, to tell him to be safe, though he waves all concern away—and holds out a length of wood so that he can easily see. Rattan. Sleek and purposeful. A braided handle for grip. The scent of linseed oil and lavish care.  
  
“Kiss it,” Pierce orders, an unnecessary order but part of the protocol. His mouth belongs to them as much as every other piece. The wood is night-warm against his lips.  
  
“So good,” Pierce says again, easing back to his feet. “For us. For Hydra. For me.”  
  
And the caning begins.  
  
Pierce is skilled and strong despite his age. The equipment is strong too. The length whistles through the air. Lines of lightning erupt. An initial sting, first. Then the truer deeper pain, as compressed nerves begin registering and radiating sensation. Welts form.  
  
Pierce begins with his ass, twin curves already bruised and scratched and marked. This agony mixes and mingles with the previous. He thinks he might be dying, though he knows he is not. Pain and sensory overload and—  
  
—and, oh, but Pierce never strikes the center, that tortured anguished furl of muscle, the spot where all his nerve endings jostle and scrape and tangle, confusing pain for pleasure and desperation for desire; the cane beats on across his ass, left and right and above and below his stretched opening, teasing flirting leading on. His hole flutters, yearning and lost and helpless. He’s pleading. He does not know why.  
  
The cane strikes lower. Thighs, now. Tiger-stripes, claws, talons. His legs shake. Explosions in his brain, in his veins.  
  
Higher, working back up. He might be bleeding; Pierce pauses, and a hand touches his left thigh, and that voice says words, but he’s past comprehending. He is being spoken to with kindness and tormented with the cane, and he knows nothing but the buzz of sound and the whirl of anguish and ecstasy. His cock’s drooling liquid ribbons of need to the floor, leaving puddles of copious wetness, and when the next impact lances across the very first welt he twitches involuntarily. The motion rubs his cockhead into the iron railing. He opens his mouth. He whimpers. He cannot help it.  
  
“That’s fine,” Pierce tells him gently. “You are allowed to cry. That is how we know.”  
  
“How we know what,” asks an audience member, timid.  
  
“The importance of mercy,” Pierce says, “and cruelty. You cannot have the former without understanding the latter,” and rests the cane briefly across the body’s back. The body’s shuddering: dread, anticipation, bewilderment, need. “Spread your legs. Wider.”  
  
He complies. His body complies. As far as he can.  
  
The cane swoops down. Flawless aim. Crashing onto his abused swollen hole.  
  
The world vanishes in white-hot flame.  
  
Pierce canes him on that spot methodically, thoroughly, precisely. He thinks that the second and third strikes get easier, no longer a surprise, but then the blows melt into each other and he melts into the fire and he stops thinking. He is blurring and bleeding like a chalk-painting in rain. He is colors muddying, mixing, greying out, indecipherable.  
  
He feels himself go limp at last under the blows. Pliant. Collapsing over the railing. Body slack, mouth slack, face wet. He knows that he is crying, rather than feeling the tears.  
  
Pierce orders, again: “Spread your legs.”  
  
He tries. The body, his body, does not want to obey. The railing cuts into his stomach and holds him up, folded in half like limp rags over a wire.   
  
Pierce tuts softly. Nudges his thighs apart with the cane. Says, to the audience, “Nearly there.”  
  
The cane slips between his legs. Taps upward—lightly, ever so lightly—against his straining drug-heavy cock. He shatters. He is coming, coming despite the cock ring, coming over the cane, coming in ugly jagged spurts that feel ripped from his bones—  
  
He is sobbing because he has failed. He did not wait for permission, but—but he could not—  
  
“Shh,” Pierce tells him. “You aren’t finished yet. You have more to give. And I meant for that to happen. A design. A lesson in…cruelty.”  
  
He can’t stop sobbing.  
  
“You may be forgiven,” Pierce tells him. “You may be forgiven if you come for me once more. On my command.”  
  
He can’t. Can he? There’s nothing left. He’s spilled his guts and the marrow of his bones and all his tears. The drug’s wearing off and his cock’s hard but less than before.  
  
“As I hurt you,” Pierce tells him, “you will come for me,” and a hand snaps open the cock-ring—relief like another orgasm shudders dryly through him—and then the cane returns, the cane always returns, rat-tat-tat of rhythm over his balls and his cock, eternal and unvarying. He does not want it to end, or he does, or there is no difference: he is whatever Alexander Pierce wants from him.   
  
He jerks, moaning, against his bonds. His eyes open blindly, and close. Coruscating supernovae rattle his bones, his body. He writhes.  
  
“Now,” Pierce decides, infinitely merciful, voice like an angel’s at his side. “Come for us.” And the cane rubs— _rubs_ , this time, excruciatingly drawn-out—along his cock.  
  
He wails. He comes. He breaks apart as his cock spills its last poor reserves, as his balls draw up, as his asshole clenches and leaks come and blood and vodka and lube down his legs. He opens his eyes somehow in the middle of the deluge, not meaning to, not meaning anything; and as he comes he sees Steve Rogers’ face, the projector still merrily spinning newsreel Avengers battle footage below in the ballroom.  
  
Pierce lifts the cane, sticky with come and blood from broken welts. He knows what’s expected. When he kisses it a second time it smells and tastes of himself.  
  
“Good soldier,” Pierce says, “good boy,” and he closes his eyes and he thinks he passes out, or at least he remembers nothing more.  
  
  
In the present he wakes abruptly, disoriented and blinking. He wakes to find himself on his feet, standing naked in the middle of the bedroom in the grey silk of night; he wakes to Steve’s best frightened-but-trying-to-sound-calm Captain America voice saying, “Bucky? Bucky, wake up, it’s a nightmare, please stop, please look at me, please stop—”  
  
Stop? He becomes aware of pain in his leg. He looks down. He’s sunk the fingers of his metal hand far into his thigh. Blood wells up as he watches. Beading down toward the floor.  
  
“Bucky—” Steve’s on both feet in front of him, equally naked in ways literal and metaphorical, hands outstretched. “Bucky, you’re safe, you’re safe now, you can stop—we can talk about it if you need to feel—but please stop for now so we _can_ talk about it, okay?”  
  
He has to laugh at that assumption. And then regrets it, at the expression on Steve’s face. “This time _you’ve_ been talking to Stark. And Sam. Both?”  
  
A guilty wince speeds over Steve’s face. “I didn’t mean—”  
  
“You did.” He lifts the hand away. Swears, flattens fingers back down over deep gouges. Too much blood, dripping toward the hardwood floor and the bedroom rug. It’ll stain. “I don’t care. You can.”  
  
“I’m sorry—”  
  
“I don’t _care_ , Stevie.” Shooting for honesty, maybe missing by a mile; but he does mean it. He doesn’t mind Steve talking to the others about him. Steve needs to talk. And, hell, they might know more about the inside of his head than he does. He peeks under his hand. Okay. Wounds closing. A palm filled up with blood, though. “Hey,” he says, “did you hear the joke about the robot who could bleed?”  
  
“Oh God,” Steve says, crying.  
  
Bucky swears again and dives forward to get his spare arm around Steve’s shoulders, apologizing, holding on, not stopping to think about the reaction and how much it’s exactly what Bucky Barnes would do. He doesn’t know what to do with his hand full of blood, so he just kind of holds it away from Steve, in the air. “Come on,” he says, “I’m sorry, that was stupid, I didn’t mean I think I’m a robot, I’m not a robot, Steve, you know damn well I didn’t mean that, you just wanted me to hold you, didn’t you, punk,” and Steve sniffles a little into his shoulder and chokes on a watery laugh. “Got me…”  
  
“Knew it,” Bucky says triumphantly, and Steve punches him weakly in the kidney. “Jerk. God. You looked—your _face_ , Buck, you were having a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake you up, and—fuck.”  
  
“I know.” He tips his head against Steve’s. Standing tangled together in the center of their bedroom, in the center of the night. “I know.”   
  
“Let me see,” Steve says, making a _please?_ gesture toward his thigh. “Looked kinda bad.”  
  
“It’s not.” He lets Steve fuss, though; lets Steve walk him to the bathroom and fret over bandages and antiseptic cream. The gashes are already closing, newborn lines of fragile skin. He tries to surreptitiously rinse his hand free of blood while Steve’s finishing with bandages.  
  
“How _much_ blood was that?”  
  
“Sheesh, Steve. Not even enough to worry your pretty head about.”  
  
Steve’s eyebrows go up, under the white lights of the bathroom. “Gosh, Buck, you think I’m pretty?”  
  
The man who sometimes on good days thinks of himself as Bucky Barnes realizes that he’d answered without thinking, then. And Steve’s flip question covers _I’m so scared_ and _please let me help_ and _I don’t know how to help and I’m sorry_ and _there must be SOMETHING Captain America can do_ and _I love you through and past my dying breath_ all in one.  
  
Sitting naked on the cold closed seat of the toilet while Steve Rogers kneels at his feet with mourning eyes, Bucky says, “It was a nightmare.”  
  
“Yeah, I got that.”  
  
“No, I meant your face. No, seriously. I wasn’t trying to…I don’t know. To hurt myself. I didn’t. Try to.” He suspects that he’d in fact been trying to recreate that remembered sensation in his dream. That horrible wonderful drowning brutal radiant sensation. He doesn’t say so. “I didn’t know what I was doing, Steve, I swear.”  
  
Steve sighs, “Yeah, I thought—I thought so,” but some secret tension’s gone out of the place behind his eyes. “You didn’t look like you were awake. Do you, um. Want to talk about it?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I can listen if you want to talk.”  
  
“I said no. How’d I ever forget how fuckin’ stubborn you are, Rogers?”  
  
“You didn’t.” Steve gets up, holds out hands: Bucky takes them, getting up from his seat atop the toilet. “You knew me.”  
  
“Guess I did.”  
  
“You know me.”  
  
“Guess I do.”  
  
“I know you,” Steve says, eyes earnest, voice earnest, hands earnest. “If you forget. If you need to know. If the nightmares—I know you, Bucky, I’d always know you.”  
  
I’m not Bucky, he wants to point out. But that’s not true either. He is Bucky, or quite a lot of pieces of him are. The problem’s all the _other_ pieces. The ones Steve’s too good to see.  
  
“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe you do. Come back to bed.”  
  
Steve comes readily, holding onto his hand. Too readily; a shark’s-fin of unease surfaces, turns over, re-submerges in his gut. Oh, Steve.  
  
Who misinterprets his momentary hesitation as concern—very naturally—about going back to sleep. “We can talk about something else. Whatever you want. Hey, have you talked to Natasha lately? Because she said she was arranging something special for the party and I’m not sure whether we ought to be really worried and maybe you could—Buck? You okay?”  
  
…party. A week. The cane’s in a concealed spot in the spare bedroom, along with everything else he’s managed to acquire. Not enough. Not good enough for Steve. He wants to have options for Steve. Whatever Steve asks of him, he must be able to give.  
  
He loves Steve. Every blasted-apart fragment of his once-whole self knows that. And so: whatever Steve asks. Always.  
  
“Okay,” he echoes. “Yeah. Sorry. Just—fuzzy. For a sec.”  
  
“Stay right there,” Steve orders, concerned line reappearing between eyebrows, and sprints to the kitchen and comes back with a gallon of orange-pineapple juice. “Here. Blood sugar.”  
  
“Pineapple.” He raises eyebrows at Steve. Steve grins right back and goes all faux-innocent with the “Yeah?”   
  
So it’s Bucky Barnes who hands over the juice to share, and who inquires, “You know they make pineapple-flavored lube these days?” just in time to make Steve choke on a swallow.  
  
Steve surfaces spluttering and indignant and relieved and laughing. Perfect, Bucky decides, and steals the juice back from him, as they sit naked and new-bandaged on the bed: shoulder pressed up against shoulder in the summertime night.


	3. party night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve learns what Bucky's been thinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings for** consent issues, past (non-explicit here) abuse/sexual exploitation.
> 
> If the last chapter was the worst in terms of explicit awful, this might be worse emotionally. I promise comfort in the last chapter, though. Really. *preemptive hugs*

The evening’s red, white, and blue; and painful.  
  
Not physically painful, not yet. He shifts weight, ill at ease. The Winter Soldier would not fidget. He stops.  
  
Steve had gone to get them drinks a minute ago, but has been waylaid by Agent Phil Coulson, who as far as Bucky’s knock-off serum-enhanced hearing can make out has a question about vintage comic books. Steve looks flattered and polite and only a tiny bit exasperated, and the latter comes with an apologetic glance back toward Bucky’s corner. Bucky lifts a shoulder, drops it: it’s fine, we’re fine, have fun. Steve gets that sad small line between his eyebrows and answers Coulson’s question.  
  
It’s not a huge party, made up of Avengers and plus-ones: the people Tony Stark knows and considers friends. This is a smaller group than most would guess, though the proliferation of patriotic decorations is doing its spunky best to ensure no space remains unoccupied. Tony’s bought at best estimate every red, white, and blue item in Manhattan, and had proclaimed very gleefully that he just wanted to make Steve feel at home. Steve had—perfectly deadpan—said, “Gosh, thank you, Tony, can we put on some forties music too?”   
  
Steve of course has wide-ranging musical taste and has plunged into the twenty-first century with vast appreciation for everything from the Ramones to Taylor Swift, all without losing his love for the music he’d grown up on. Tony Stark is currently the one suffering.  
  
Steve’d glanced Bucky’s way and grinned, when Tony wasn’t watching. Conspiratorial, mischievous, the return of the scrawny punk kid who’d take on anyone trying to mess with him or his friends. Bucky’d been breathless: in love.  
  
He’s spent the first two hours lurking in various shadows. Nicer there. Less idle chatter. Unobtrusive. He wants to be ready when Steve wants him, and he cannot waste energy on the demands of small talk and social niceties beforehand. Most people’ve been leaving him alone, either out of fear or consideration; Pepper Potts came by once to ask whether he wanted to try any food, and told him that his hair looked nice when he said no, and then left. Clint Barton—Hawkeye—had wandered over about forty minutes after that, leaned a shoulder on the wall beside him, and signed _Got a collapsible bow and two arrows in my boot._  
  
Bucky’d raised eyebrows. Answered _Two knives, garrote, this—_ and wiggles explanatory fingers. He does not recall learning to sign. His body knows. His body…  
  
Clint had interrupted that train—deliberately or not—before it could derail. _Throwing match? First one to kill the Lady Liberty cake wins._  
  
Pepper would murder them, but he’d been tempted to agree, if only to quiet on-edge nerves. Just then, though, presents had arrived. A preserved wartime Captain America-plus-chorus-girls poster from Tony, as ridiculous and gently full of memory as might be expected. One of Steve’s own sketches, framed and recovered from a private collector, from the Black Widow. Asgardian mead from Thor. Music from Sam, plus a pair of jogging shoes, which makes Steve laugh for reasons that no one in Bucky’s head comprehends. Tony jumps in, “I helped with those! And it is not easy to design shoes that can hold up to the blistering raw power of the Captain America feet, I will have you know.” Agent Coulson looks intrigued.  
  
Bucky—or the collection of people and once-people that these days goes by the name—stifles the urge to fidget again. Steve has let him keep his back to the wall and avoid the spotlight epicenter of gifts and food and effusive mutual praise. Steve has not asked anything of him other than his presence.  
  
Steve thinks that this is being kind. Steve’s eyes light up and glow every time they scan the room and land on Bucky’s face.  
  
Bucky wants to scream. Wants to cram metal fingers into his mouth to hold _back_ the scream. Either. Both.  
  
Steve has asked nothing of him. Has given him no orders, no directives. No hint at any of the activities that must be planned for later or for sometime soon. He can be good, he can be whatever Steve and the party guests need, but he has to _know what they need_. This is wrong. This is wrong and unfair, how can Steve expect him to know, what doesn’t he know, will he be punished for not knowing—  
  
He flinches from the word _unfair_. Too close to criticism. He must not criticize. He must be dutiful. Obedient. Well-behaved.  
  
But Steve also wants him to be Bucky Barnes. Bucky Barnes would argue against unfairness. Bucky Barnes would saunter up to Steve and take a piece of birthday cake right out of Steve’s hands and drawl sweetly lascivious words about _you and me, doll, makin’ a party of our own…_  
  
He cannot imagine ever doing so. Bucky Barnes plays like a two-dimensional black-and-white soundless film in his head: an era long past.  
  
He looks at his hands. His body: unmatching, uneven, incapable of being the man Steve wants. _A_ body, not Steve’s body: not the body Steve loved.  
  
He believes—this body believes—that Steve Rogers loved Bucky Barnes, that Bucky loved Steve, that neither of them ever spoke of it out of stubborn blind martyrdom. Steve has said so; Steve broke down weeping the first time this body, on a curious whim, traced the shape of Steve’s lips, and then Steve said so: _always, always, Buck, I always—_  
  
Steve has never lied to him.   
  
He is wearing a compromise of clothing: worn-to-softness grey-black jeans that the ever-helpful Darcy Lewis had labeled “cuddly sex,” plus one of Steve’s plain white t-shirts. Steve has given him no instructions about attire. He had assumed, he thinks correctly, that Steve would not want him naked until called for; the jeans are an attempt at enticement, entertainment, eye candy if he is to be clothed while on display. He has chosen one of Steve’s shirts for reasons he cannot precisely explain. The fabric smells of clean laundry and a bit of Steve himself, who’d thrown this shirt on when Sam’d appeared early for breakfast yesterday morning and promptly made exaggerated noises of distress about naked supersoldiers in the kitchen.   
  
When he breathes in that scent, this body wants to smile. Steve had smiled too, upon seeing him. He does not know why. But Steve did not ask him to change, and so: he is wearing Steve’s shirt, tonight. Before whatever’s coming descends.  
  
He is also wearing a leather belt, a cock ring, no underwear, and the second-largest of the anal plugs he’s ordered over the past few weeks.   
  
He’s readied himself: his hole’s slick and wet with lube, stretched by the thickness, and the plug moves inside him as he shifts weight. He clenches around it: frissons of pleasure and dread and pain shimmy up and down his spine. His cock is hard, but not at full-mast: the uncertainty skitters through him with distracting force. Will Steve even want him hard? Would Steve prefer him limp and unaroused, no pleasure in the use of his holes? He has dim memories of a night like that, a night in which…something, some drug…had kept his cock, and most of his limbs, small and malleable and floppy as a child’s toy, while men handled him and fucked him.   
  
Steve has wanted him in the months since the Potomac and the green water and the clasp of hands. Steve has wanted him to be present and to enjoy the sensations and to reach orgasm without waiting for command. And the body has done all these things. Has even meant them, and has _wanted_ to mean them: he wants to see Steve grin, sex-hazy and sloppy and sated and proud of them both in the aftermath.   
  
This is a party. The rules are different.  
  
Will Steve let them all fuck him? Thor, utilizing the unknown capacities of a god-alien? Natasha, with her neat deadly hands and their shared history he can’t remember? Tony Stark, who makes fiendishly clever inventions? All of them at _once?_ He keeps the tremble internal. No one sees.  
  
He has stored the rest of the equipment—gags, plugs, canes of various types, beads, vibrators, clamps, knives, floggers, crops, rope, costumes, electrical stimulation equipment, and so on—in a box under the bed in the spare room, the bedroom they don’t use. Steve will not look, or at least has had no reason to look in the past month, and after tonight will know; the items are only two floors away, back in their apartment, and he’ll fetch them readily once Steve asks. Naked, if Steve asks. He had not wanted to presume enough to bring the box down to the party. Steve might be angry about not being consulted as to brand and style and in some cases color and flavor.  
  
But, he decides, abruptly frustrated, Steve _can’t_ be angry. Steve’s given him no instructions. He’s had to _guess_.  
  
That word again: unfair.  
  
He’d given in and asked Doctor Banner for help crafting unbreakable cuffs. Doctor Banner’d started to ask why; Bucky’d flexed the metal arm, and somber green-hued compassion’d swum up in that gaze. Doctor Banner knows about the need to contain pieces of oneself, of course. The need to try as hard as possible to never hurt loved ones. Bucky’d let him go on thinking the project merely a precaution, even a good sign regarding the ability to make requests and protect others. This assessment’s not entirely wrong. Bucky Barnes wishes Steve Rogers to be safe from discomfort, and here he is handling the arrangements for the party so that Steve will not have to be discomfited.  
  
Perhaps Steve will only order him to remain in place, without cuffs or restraints. He will try. As long as he can; until they push him beyond even his limits. He is afraid he will struggle without meaning to if they employ certain devices. He is afraid he might jerk or flail and cause harm. But perhaps Steve will hold him down the whole time. If that is to be the case, he…might be less afraid.  
  
The Winter Soldier does not know how to be afraid. The Winter Soldier knows pain and knows consequence and punishment, but these are not precisely like fear. Bucky Barnes knew hunger and the sound of Steve’s cough and war.  
  
This body sometimes feels its heart race, its skin prickle, for reasons it cannot define. When it turns and does not see Steve. When it sees a New Orleans balcony on a television program about history. When Steve Rogers throws himself in front of a Hydra-stronghold tank and the body desperately flings itself right after.  
  
He waits. He stands in his chosen shadow in the far corner of the common room. Steve tells him nothing.   
  
The lack of information wears on. Another hour meanders past. It’s full of cake and frivolous tipsy dancing: Tony Stark spinning Pepper Potts, Thor tossing Jane Foster and catching her effortlessly, the Black Widow dragging Steve into an approximation of basic swing dance. The forties twinkle on in musical tinsel: gay, historic, festive.   
  
Perhaps this is a form of psychological test. It is, he decides, effective. The most effective yet, for a party night. Steve is better at this than the body gave him credit for.   
  
The plug seems even larger now than when first inserted, pushing at the rim of his hole, pushing deep inside his channel. He wonders whether Steve will use the belt on him if he dares to ask. He’s worn it so that it can be used.  
  
The night winds ahead, steady and monotonous as a metronome. The city’s fireworks should be starting soon, Tony’s friend Rhodey reminds everyone. Out over the water, easy to see on this clear Independence Day night. Should be great for watching.  
  
“Bucky tried to tell me they were for me,” Steve relates, laughing, cheeks very slightly pink from unearthly mead. He’ll metabolize it fast, but it works for a short while, and Steve’s never turned down a challenge. “When we were kids. Said it was a birthday present, ’cause it happened on my birthday, every year.”  
  
Most of the gazes in the room swivel to Bucky’s shadow. He wants to retreat, but maybe this is a sign; maybe Steve’s summoning him. To be a birthday present. He says, “You didn’t believe me.”  
  
“You’re good at charming,” Steve says, “what you’re not is a good fuckin’ liar. But I did believe you, you don’t remember?”  
  
“You pretended to so I’d feel like it worked.” He doesn’t mean that statement to come out so flat. He’d wanted teasing, a reply to Steve’s gregarious flushed mood. But he says it wrong or too fast or too blunt somehow. He says it because what he wants to say is _no, you’re wrong, Bucky Barnes was good at charming and never good at outright lies, but I’m the inside-out version, the other way around, and I love you in whatever fucked-up ways I’ve got left and you don’t know me, you love him._  
  
Steve’s smile dims around the edges. “Yeah…guess I did…never knew you knew.”  
  
“Not like you’re a good fuckin’ liar either,” his mouth offers, and Steve’s face looks brighter. Natasha’s making a _yep, pretty much_ expression in the background.   
  
“Come see fireworks?” Steve’s hopeful eyes turn this into a bigger question. Take my hand, come with me, enjoy my birthday. Not an order. An invitation.  
  
And he can’t take it; he _can’t_ , as the rest of the Avengers amble toward the huge dramatic windows and the imminent holiday view. He’s too far off-balance, unmoored by ordinariness, and he’s breaking, because Steve’s broken him and made him beg.  
  
“Steve,” he says.  
  
Though he’s speaking quietly, Steve spins instantly into action. Stance sobering and firming up: protective, shielding, placing broad shoulders between Bucky and any threat in the room. “Buck? You okay?”  
  
This question has no meaning, but he knows that Steve believes it does. “Yes,” he opts for. “When do we start?”  
  
“Start what? The fireworks? Right now, didn’t you hear—”  
  
“The party?”  
  
“The party?” Steve’s eyes get baffled. “It already is.”  
  
“Then…” He waves a hand. A gesture. “Where would you like me? Please. I can—if you want me to ask for it—but _tell me what the fuck I’m supposed to do—”_  
  
Steve’s saying, “What?” over the question, eyes wider, something akin to horror dawning behind beloved blue.  
  
“The entertainment.” Perhaps Steve isn’t expecting him to be so vocal. Perhaps he ought to remain quiet. Perhaps he ought to speak when spoken to. But—this is _Steve_. “Tell me what to do. I tried. But I can’t—I’m sorry, Stevie, God, I _am_ , but just—”  
  
Steve stares at him.  
  
The body feels tears spring to its eyes: frustration, self-castigation, shame. He does not want the tears, but they do not go away. He thinks that he would like Steve to touch him, to tell him that this is all right; but Steve remains motionless, lips parted on a word that does not come.  
  
The other Avengers are turning around. Noticing. Asking low questions. Behind them the first of the fireworks explodes: scatters of vicious purple and red and green into deep blue. No one pays attention.  
  
He takes a step forward. His knees give way. He manages to turn the shakiness into a graceful drop: kneeling at Steve’s feet, hands behind his back. He should bend his head, should bare his neck and look down; but he’s transfixed by Steve’s gaze.  
  
Steve’s mouth does something strange. Crumpling. He does not understand it. “Buck—”  
  
“I didn’t find everything.” He’s exasperated and frightened and tired of _being_ exasperated and frightened: the dull irritable scratch of dread has worn him thin. He _has_ tried. Steve must know he has. “Everything I could, though. Would you like me in cuffs? They’ll hold me. We checked. I can go get them.” He’s babbling. Speaking too quickly. Words tripping and skidding and merging in panic. “And anything else from upstairs. Gags? Paddles? A hairbrush? The cane?”  
  
Bruce Banner’s face has gone pale at the mention of cuffs. Pepper Potts puts both hands over her mouth, an involuntary shocked gesture. Clint’s eyes are flickering over his lips, reading fast as if trying to find corroboration of the sound as it comes through hearing aids, head shaking slowly.  
  
“Oh no no,” Tony Stark utters. “You—I think maybe I fucked up, but no, wait, I _didn’t_ tell you to—”  
  
“You gave me time to prepare,” he says to Tony, and then, to Steve, “he gave me advance warning, he helped me, it’s not his fault—”  
  
“I didn’t fucking tell you to buy _gags_ and a _cane_ —” Tony’s pleading with Steve. “I didn’t.”  
  
“I know,” Steve scrapes out. Reassurance for the audience: barely making it. The next round of fireworks laces the air with gunpowder and bomb-light.  
  
On his knees, he tries once more, begs Steve to end this interminable agony and start the evening at last: “Would you like me naked now?”  
  
“Oh God—” Steve turns away. One arm braced on the closest wall. Breaths coming harsh and wet.   
  
The Winter Soldier would not care. Bucky Barnes would throw arms around _his_ Steve and bristle at onlookers.  
  
He gets to his feet. He does not make a conscious choice to reach out, but he is doing so, as if reaching out for Steve is hard-wired into his DNA. His flesh-and-blood hand hovers above Steve’s shoulder but does not touch. “I’m here.”  
  
“Are you,” Steve chokes out. “You’re not—God, I thought you were—were better, I—how did I not fucking know, why didn’t I see—”  
  
“I am.” Steve can’t see that? Steve doesn’t know? “Better. With you.”  
  
Steve laughs. Gut-punched and hollow.  
  
“I don’t understand,” he implores. He doesn’t.  
  
“Bucky,” Sam Wilson says. Calm and careful and contained. “How about you tell us what a party means to you.”  
  
“It means a celebration.” He glances from face to face around the ring of guests. Searching for confirmation. “With…entertainment.”  
  
“What _kind_ of entertainment?”  
  
This is a question with an impossible answer: too many options. And yet they ask it of him. He answers cautiously, “Whatever you would like,” and watches expressions change. Distressed, he provides more information, more words: “I can be used in any way you prefer. Pain, pleasure, oral, anal, giving, receiving—I am fully functional in all areas. I obey commands. I won’t scream. Unless you want me to.”  
  
“Jesus,” Sam breathes. Tony’s swearing under his breath. Steve—  
  
He can’t look at Steve.  
  
“I’m here for you to use,” he explains. “To play with. To—to do what you want. A body. Genitals. A hole. Holes. I heal. Please.” He’s too aware of the plug inside him, the slipperiness of thoroughly applied lube, the thin metal line of the cock ring that’s locked tight around his shaft and balls. Does Steve _not_ want him? But—no, Steve does want him, does find him pleasurable sexually. Steve cannot be afraid of hurting him; that is what parties are for. He is the canvas on which they indulge myriad desires. He is a good canvas.  
  
He says, “They—he—they used to enjoy me.”  
  
He says, “I’m good, I can be very good, I want to be, Steve, I swear, for you, so just give me an order.”  
  
He says, “Please.”  
  
Steve’s shoulders are shaking.  
  
He feels himself falling apart: shattered on the altar of having hurt Steve. Of having hurt Steve without intention, without even knowing. He pulls his hand back, never having rested it on Steve’s arm.  
  
Steve stumbles through the shove off the wall, the turn to face him. “Buck—”  
  
“I’m not your Bucky Barnes.” He amends immediately, because he never wants to see Steve _that_ stunned and stricken again, “I mean I am, I know I…was, but I’m not. I know you think I am. And I’m trying to be, I swear I am, but it’s—you said charming. Before.”  
  
Steve’s face twists. Hands held hopelessly out. “No, I—I don’t think you’re—oh, no, oh God, what’ve I done to you—”  
  
“You love him,” Bucky says. “And I love you.” He doesn’t know whether Steve’s picked up on the difference. “It’s too many pieces, Stevie, not your fault.”  
  
“Pieces—”  
  
“Him. Before. And Hydra’s whore. And me. I know how parties go. Especially on your birthday. I thought—” He doesn’t know how to phrase it to make Steve see. “I thought I wouldn’t mind as much this time. If you were real and I was me. I can do this. Tonight.”  
  
“… _birthday_ parties…when was I not _real_ —oh. Oh those _fucking_ _bastards_ —”  
  
“You know how to use a StarkPad,” Sam Wilson interposes out of nowhere, “yeah?”  
  
Despite seeming irrelevance, this is a direct question regarding his capabilities. He could choose to not answer, these days, but it’s a reflex. “Yes.”   
  
He’s in fact better with technology than Steve, though not because Steve’s any slouch. The Winter Soldier’d been trained in both specific computer skills and broader problem-attacking methodology by the best Soviet hackers and codebreakers. Bucky Barnes had always been better than Steve at science and bottle-rockets and math.  
  
Sam tosses over said tablet—Tony’s, or rather one of Tony’s many, scooped up from where it’d been showing cat videos to Thor earlier on. “Here. Look up what most average people do at a birthday party. I know you won’t necessarily believe our word on this one, so check for yourself.”  
  
He has no reason to mistrust the Falcon, whom Steve trusts so sincerely. He can also verify information in multiple ways, given an unlocked StarkPad.  
  
He looks up the standard definition of and most common activities at a “birthday party.” For children, teens, adults.  
  
He reads. He verifies in ways both simple and complex.   
  
The fireworks boom and burst and fade out in the distance, gearing up for a big finish.  
  
He puts the StarkPad down on a chair-arm, where it sits in tranquil silence. If he cares to, he can hear his own heartbeat, the tidal waves of blood through the body’s arteries and veins.  
  
“I think,” he says, “I ought to leave.”  
  
Steve’s mouth falls open, and Steve makes an awful wounded gulping noise like he’s been punched in the gut, and Steve protests, “No—”  
  
“I don’t know what a party is. I don’t know how to be here. I’m not—” He doesn’t know what he’s not. In the end he says it again, a complete statement of truth as is: “I’m not.”  
  
“No,” Steve’s saying, “no, no, Bucky, no, please, fuck, no—”  
  
Natalia—Natasha, here and now—meets his eyes.  
  
He says, “Please don’t look for me.” He doesn’t know how else to say what he needs to say.  
  
“Don’t—” Steve sounds destroyed. Ruined. Artwork shredded by blades. “Don’t ask that—don’t ask me that, not you—”  
  
“Please take care of him,” he says to Natasha, to the Falcon, to Tony Stark. Natasha nods.   
  
Steve takes a step forward. Sam Wilson puts a hand on his shoulder. The Lady Liberty cake, lacking support on one side, topples over in the background. Frosting splatters like guts. Red and white and blue: insides squashed out over tablecloth linen.  
  
The body wants to stay. To reach out, to—  
  
Because he will stay if he does not go _now_ , he runs.


	4. morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Bucky explores himself and a giant bathtub, and makes some choices.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone for reading and commenting! This is probably at once the darkest thing I've ever written and maybe the most hopeful, coming out of the dark at the end.
> 
> **Minor warnings for this chapter** just for Bucky thinking about past abuse, dealing with the fallout of the previous chapter, and slowly trying to acknowledge his body as *his* body, with the help of a bubble bath and fuzzy sweatpants.

He runs, and it is not a tactically considered retreat, not a cool calculated winter-etched strategy; it is hot and panicked and powered by short breaths and a pulse drumming in his ears. He plunges through doors and down temperature-regulated Tower hallways, and finally throws himself out a window three floors up because he can’t stay inside those walls any longer—  
  
He lands on both feet, instinctively catching balance. The impact rings up through his boots; he blinks. His vision’s wrong, a cloud of sparkles and multicolored light across dark shapes, where’s _that_ coming from, is his programming collapsing at last—  
  
Oh. Fireworks. Fourth of July.  
  
He puts a hand out. Touches the sleek grey wall of the Tower, where he’s standing beside it with both boots on the ground. Breathes.  
  
Fireworks. Steve’s birthday.  
  
He’s still here next to the Tower and he asked Steve not to look for him but he doesn’t know—  
  
He doesn’t know whether Steve will want him back, enough to look—  
  
He doesn’t know whether he wants Steve to look for him—  
  
His eyes burn. Odd. Dry and hot, like fire licking behind his lids when he closes them.  
  
He vanishes away into the shapes and shadows of the dark. Not far. A couple of alleys over. Lots of alleys in New York City. Always have been.  
  
This alley’s relatively tidy, for a given metropolis-value of tidy. Two dumpsters. Winding metal fire-escapes like decorative art. The sky above like a narrow strip of smoky blue velvet, punctuated by scattershot Independence Day flame. He flattens his back against helpful dusty brick, and then thinks dimly that he’s wearing a clean white t-shirt— _Steve’s_ shirt, oh hell—and that’s not going to be white and clean for long.  
  
He’s not. Clean.  
  
The fireworks burst above like cannon-fire and death in ecstatic colors.  
  
He needs—  
  
He wants—  
  
Does he? Want?  
  
The thick black anal plug he’s wearing stirs wetly, having a will of its own, rubbing inside his body. The body. With the plug.  
  
The urge to vomit swells. He battles it down. He is good at battles. He is—  
  
Good?  
  
He breathes, hearing how much he sounds like a wounded animal; he puts hands on knees, and bends over and pants for air under the delirious crash-and-crackle of the firework finale.  
  
When he lifts his head he spots the corner of an ATM at the other end of the alley. He has a bank account of his own—Tony Stark had set that up, and Pepper Potts had said something about prisoners of war and decades of earned back-pay—but he can’t use that. Steve might be watching. Someone might be watching.  
  
Maybe. If they care to.  
  
It’s the work of a moment to ascertain that, while both Hydra remnants and SHIELD agents have been exquisitely thorough, one or two old accounts remain. Small ones, the type made available to him on missions if supplies were required, for instance a purchase of innocuous deadly deceitful household items that’d appear nothing like an assassination at all. These accounts are miniscule enough to’ve been missed. He empties both. Cash.  
  
He has a great deal of money, now.  
  
He genuinely does not know whether Steve will come looking.  
  
He turns his back on the Tower. It worries after him, but he ignores this and picks out the most luxurious hotel in the city, the fanciest glitziest shiniest hotel, adjective piled upon adjective. The sort of place Bucky Barnes could never’ve afforded; the sort of place the Winter Soldier would’ve never understood. Strategic, he tells himself.   
  
He spots a lightweight sports jacket left on a balcony—someone who’d come out to see fireworks, maybe, and forgotten it—and hops up to grab it because he’s wearing a short-sleeved t-shirt (that no longer smells like Steve, and he’s not thinking about that) and the arm’s a bit conspicuous.   
  
He can’t do much about the hair. It gets in his mouth at one point. Hydra had wanted it long: a disguise, a means of control and obedience to their orders about hair-cutting or not, a test of his skill. He swipes it out of his face, registers mild annoyance, stops mid-step because: mild everyday human annoyance.   
  
When he strolls into his chosen opulent hotel—between two faux-Roman marble-and-gold pillars that’re trying way too hard— the napping late-night desk clerk jolts awake and gives him a fascinated once-over. Expensive distressed jeans, borrowed coat, dark hair in his face, hand jammed into his pocket. He tilts his head, chin lifted, eyes dismissive. Tries to pull off _eccentric billionaire, cranky about melodramatic holiday kerfluffle, seeking peace and quiet_.  
  
The clerk visibly waffles, contemplates, buys the act. More so when cash appears. He keeps the arm hidden. Tony Stark does not like to be handed things. He can be equally fanciful. The clerk slides the key across the counter, after a second.  
  
He picks his way around ornamental ferns and questionably dressed statuary. He takes the stairs even though it’s thirty floors up. Not a hardship. And he’s faster than an elevator.  
  
The room’s sumptuous and florid and gaudy, but not in a bad way. Brown-and-topaz striped silk on walls and counterpanes. Draperies falling over tall windows, thick and serene. Mirrors with overwrought massive gilt frames, and a mini-bar that won’t do him any good, and above all a kind of hushed meaningful breath-holding: the room and the universe waiting to see where they collectively go from here.  
  
He kicks off his boots. They land with twin thuds. Black smudges on plush cream carpet.  
  
He looks at the black huddled shapes, and his hand—his flesh-and-blood hand—starts to shake, and then _he’s_ shaking. Everywhere. Under Steve’s clothes. Wearing his ludicrous party accessories, the ones that Steve doesn’t want, the body that Steve doesn’t—  
  
He tears it all off. Leaves useless clothing crumpled in rent-asunder pieces on the floor. Jerks open the cock-ring and throws that into the heap too. Grabs the base of the plug inside him and yanks. Gasps at roughness; drops object atop fabric-shreds; stares morbidly while it glistens, black and slick and without function now. He can feel the slick between his legs, and his stomach twists.  
  
He stumbles into the bathroom. He cannot look at himself, so he looks at the gilt-edged tile of the shower, the decadent whirlpool tub, the jets, the complimentary bottle of purple-and-gold bath salts. The floor is chilly under his toes, because it is marble, and marble is cold. The tub is nearly large enough to swim in, to share, to drown inside.  
  
He has had an aversion to tubs—to water in general: blunt forceful showers, baths, immersion, submersion—throughout the months he’s been living with Steve. Steve has never commented on the rapid-fire in-and-out of Bucky’s showers. Steve only smiles like he can’t believe Bucky’s here to be showering.  
  
He flips on the tap. As hot as it’ll go. Skin-scalding. He watches it fill. Lapping higher. Creeping up. As he stands naked and shivering on marble.  
  
When the tub is full, he shuts off the tap, and takes a deep breath, and steps in.  
  
The water’s too hot. The water’s too hot but it feels good. Scorching. Cleansing. Annealing. It embraces him without making demands. It is clear and untroubled. It does not hurt.   
  
He sits down. Water caresses his limbs, his stomach, his chest.  
  
He tilts his head back and lets ripples play with his hair. There’s an ache in his ass, but it’s far-off and knitting itself back into nonexistence. He does not ignore it, but permits it to go.  
  
He tests whether he can reach the jet controls with his toes. He can.  
  
Those _are_ his toes. Pink and callused and kind of skinny, like baby creatures peeking up from a newly bubble-strewn lake. He wiggles them.  
  
The arm’s fine in water. He’s never told Steve as much, though Steve must’ve guessed. Designed to function in rain, or fully submerged, or under sea-pressure. He uses it now to dip into frothy bathwater, breaking surface tension, and to flick tiny droplets at the closest gilty tile. The drops gleam as they land, happy to comply. The air’s steam-soaked and water-saturated. He can feel the heat in his lungs.  
  
His cock bobs, half-visible under bubbles. It’s soft now. Not hard. A hanging long weight between his thighs: innocuous, not painful, present and registering a flutter of sensation when he cups it and then lets go. That’s him. Like the toes.   
  
He experiments with the tiny bottle of bath salts. He can’t place the scent—obviously not a memory worth leaving in his head—but it’s straightforward and light and vaguely herbal and a little sweet, though not too much.    
  
He closes his eyes, letting his knees float. The tub’s too big for only him. Steve would like it, he thinks. Steve would like to draw it: the vine-and-grapes mock-Italian fresco at the back, the curving statue arms of placid-eyed nymphs pressed into service as towel-racks, the whole over-eager clumsily sincere affair. Steve would see both: the trying too hard, and the trying.  
  
He splashes a foot just because he can. No one here to tell him no. And he’s warm.  
  
Want, he thinks. Want, and Steve. Want, and Steve, and choices. Steve’s choices. His own.  
  
After a while, after the water’s gone cold, he gets up and showers properly, scrubbing every inch of himself until he’s pink and breathless and tender and almost whole; and then he hauls himself out of the bathroom, and, dripping and bundled into a robe worth more than his and Stevie’s old apartment, eyes the torn sticky disaster he’s left on the bedroom floor.  
  
He makes a call. The sleepy desk clerk becomes wide-awake at the promise of more cash. Hotel-branded gift-shop clothing appears at his door within ten minutes. As instructed, the boy simply knocks, takes the pile of money, leaves the bags, and is not there to spy a fluffy-robe-clad supersoldier snaking an arm out to pick them up.  
  
He catches a glimpse of himself in the baroque mirror as he’s getting dressed. He pauses, wandering closer. Eyes like ghost-blue, like haunting, like bruises. Dark hair, drying in tangles because he hasn’t brushed it. Glinting deadly silver and taut muscle. Plus a hotel-branded grey hoodie and navy-blue sweatpants with a logo on his ass. Hmm.  
  
The sweatpants’re soft inside. Fuzzy. His skin…might like soft and fuzzy.  
  
He runs fingers through his hair, doing the best he can.   
  
He tries out the ocean of bed in the main room. It attempts to swallow him whole in memory-foam and pillow-topped plushness. He panics briefly, punches a sausage-shaped pillow-monstrosity with tassels on the ends, falls out of the clutches of lavishness onto the floor, glares. Then gets up and dives right back in, because the bed’s not going to win.  
  
He ends up curled into the pillows in the center of the bed-ocean, hugging the stupid tassel-beast, feeling emptied-out and tired and scared as hell but also lighter and more reckless and more _real_ , feeling the fuzzy tangibility of sweatpants over bath-heated skin, catching a hint of herbal-sugar scent when he breathes.  
  
He falls asleep there, which he does not mean to do. But when he awakens from a dream he cannot remember, early fingers of dawn tugging shyly at his window-curtains, he simply yawns and burrows further into silk sheets and pillowcases and goes back to sleep, because he’s comfortable and disinclined to move.  
  
He wakes up again about two hours after that, and bolts upright, heart pounding. He can feel his pupils get wider. Steve. Oh hell. He left Steve, he didn’t come home, he told Steve not to look—  
  
Some part of his brain kicks him and says: you woke up thinking about him, not your nightmares. Yeah, he grumbles back, got that, thanks; and flips himself out of the wonderful bed with newfound purpose.  
  
He checks out via the ostentatiously large television—the future’s grand—so he doesn’t have to speak to anyone, and he goes out a back-door mostly-unused exit just out of habit. He tosses a certain towel-wrapped bundle into a dumpster a block away. The mid-morning post-holiday air’s bright and cloudless and clean, the sort of brilliant sharp clarity that throws cliff-faces and choices into stark relief.  
  
He’d dismembered the belt before wrapping it up, peeling off a strip of thin leather and twisting it enough to make it pliable. The leather’s holding up his hair in a messy attempt at a bun: maybe he can’t bring himself to cut it yet, but it’s out of his face, or it would be if he were better at making a bun.  
  
He passes shops, a bakery, a fashion boutique, a hobbyist arts-and-crafts place. He passes apartments and a tiny curly-haired girl drawing flowers on the pavement with pink-and-yellow chalk.  
  
He pauses. Retraces his steps.  
  
Ten minutes and one intimidated hobby-shop clerk later, he has a small bag in one hand and somewhat less cash in his right boot.   
  
He maybe runs a little. Thinking about Steve.   
  
When he gets back to the Tower he can’t spot anyone immediately, no signs of life, but the Winter Soldier’s at least a match for Tony Stark’s security system, plus Jarvis actually has some kind of soft spot for Bucky Barnes and more broadly for guys with trauma-skewed reactions, so Jarvis listens when Bucky says very quietly, “Hey, sit on the alarm for a sec, okay?”  
  
He says, “Thank you,” after, and settles for patting the wall of the stairwell in lieu of clapping an honorary fellow Commando on the shoulder, and then swings himself into the air-ducts and heads off to find Steve.  
  
Steve’s not in fact hard to find. Steve’s standing in the living room of his—of his and Bucky’s—quarters, fretting. Tension and unhappiness and heroic stubborn determination radiate off him like sunshine. Bucky, in the vent above his head, can’t not smile.  
  
“—look,” Sam’s saying, hand clasping Steve’s arm, low and intense, “I know, man. I get it. I _know_. But he asked you to _not_ look. He asked you for privacy. He _asked_ you for something.”  
  
Steve’s shoulders droop. “I can’t just—it’s been all night, and no one’s heard—he’s alone out there and he’s—you heard him, before he left, and the, the, everything I found in the bedroom, I can’t—what if he’s not okay, shouldn’t I—”  
  
“He’s not okay,” Sam agrees. “Neither are you. And he’s not irrational or stupid, right? He’s pretty damn capable.”  
  
“He’s not—”  
  
“He thought he knew what we were doing. He was acting _completely_ rationally, y’know, given his prior experience and understanding. Not sayin’ it’s healthy, and he’s gonna have a whole bucketload of trauma to work through, but he _did_ think he understood, he was making choices, he was _thinking_. You heard him. He knows you’re not Hydra, Steve. He was doing it for you this time.”  
  
“That’s worse,” Steve protests. “He said—Sam, he said he loves me. And I didn’t even say it back. I didn’t—”  
  
“He knows, Steve.”  
  
“No, he can’t, he said I loved _him_ —Bucky—fuck—he thinks I don’t know who he is. I _know_ who he is. He brought me goddamn blueberries in bed and he makes me smile and I _didn’t say it back_ and I need to find him, Sam, I need to tell him—”  
  
Bucky kicks open the air-vent, drops down to the living-room floor in front of Steve, curses his inability to keep his own hair out of his face, and says, “Tell me now.”  
  
“Well,” Sam says. “Don’t you have suspiciously flawless timing.”  
  
Steve’s lips say _Bucky, oh God, Bucky._  
  
“Hi,” Bucky says. “I’m. Y’know. Sorry. About leaving.”  
  
“You,” Steve starts, Steve stops. The muscle in his jaw does a heartbreaking giveaway twitch. “If you needed…if you need to.”  
  
“I hurt you.”  
  
“I, um, kinda heal…?” Please don’t hate yourself for this, Steve’s eyes beg him.   
  
“I…guess maybe I do. That. Too. I got you something.”  
  
“Bucky,” Steve breathes. The windows are open, floor to ceiling, letting morning light pour in. Steve must’ve opened them. Hoping.  
  
Steve’s eyes are so blue, and his freckles stand out over shocked-fair cheekbones, and Bucky Barnes loves him so goddamned much.  
  
“You didn’t think I meant forever,” he says, “when I said I was gonna leave, I just needed a night, I just needed,” and then he says, “Steve, Stevie, it’s okay,” because Steve’s falling apart in front of him, tears like fear and sorrow and the knife-point of a wish on the brink of coming true.  
  
“Bucky,” Steve says again, tremulous and shaken and trying hard, “or, um, not—if you don’t want to be called—I’ll stop if you want, whatever you want, I know you’re you, that came out wrong, I’m so sorry, I do know who you are and I love you, I love _you_ —”  
  
“I know.” He steps closer. Close enough for a kiss under the sunlight. “You love me. And I love you. I was always coming back, you think I’d leave your ass to get trampled by tanks without me?”  
  
Steve gulps back another sob. Swallows down agony like the noble idiot he is. “You said you know. That I love you.”  
  
“I do. Here.”  
  
“You…oh, Buck—shit, sorry—oh, wow.” Steve takes out the set of colored pencils, drawing-pencils, an infinity of iridescent color and potential. The best set he could acquire on that momentary whim. “These…where did you…why did you…”  
  
“Happy birthday,” Bucky tells him. “You can use the name. It’s part of me. The part that remembers putting ice on your big dumb hand in nineteen-thirty-eight, that time you tried to punch a wall because you broke your one good blue and we couldn’t afford a new one.”  
  
“I absolutely believe that story,” Sam says. They both ignore him. For now.  
  
Bucky says, “When I said I wouldn’t mind a party with you if it was the real me and you. I don’t want anyone else. I want you.”  
  
Steve opens his mouth, holding rainbows in one hand while the bag flutters to the floor.  
  
“No, listen,” Bucky says, hopefully before Steve can get lost in martyrdom tendencies and overactive protect-at-all-costs care. “I’m not okay. I might not be for—a while. But I know about wanting something. Someone. For me. I _want_ you. And maybe bath salts. But mostly you. Us, Steve.”  
  
And Steve hears him, really hears him. Looks into his face: searching, questioning, finding. Bucky nods, just a fraction. Steve’s lips quirk: almost a smile. Bucky has to smile back.   
  
Steve holds out the hand not occupied with art supplies. Bucky takes it. Sam, with superhuman tact, disappears from view.  
  
“I like your outfit,” Steve says. “I mean, if you don’t mind being a walking advertisement. That’s a terrible logo, too.”  
  
“Yeah? Bet you could do better.”  
  
“You sayin’ you want me to draw on you?” Steve tugs at his hand: not insistent, only asking. Bucky goes willingly. They end up chest to chest, hip to hip, heartbeat to heartbeat. “All over you? Everywhere.”  
  
“Kinky, Steve.” His pulse’s beating wildly: elation like hummingbird’s-wings, like dust-motes dancing in sunshine, like the anticipation of joy. “I’m in.”  
  
“Speaking of…” Steve bites his lip, looks like he’s maybe thinking better of the comment, says it anyway. “That stuff…everything you bought…”  
  
“I don’t know how to use most of it. I mean, I know which ones…felt good. Which ones we could throw out. Which ones might feel good if it’s you doin’ it. I know what a lot of it does. Not _how_ to do it. Kinda figured you would, really.” He hopes he’s reading Steve correctly. He thinks he is. He thinks that if this is hope he might like the way it feels.  
  
“Oh,” Steve says, happy and apprehensive and above all _Steve_ : picking up the challenge and the dare and running with it, running with it with Bucky’s hand in his, “you thought so, huh? And some of it felt good…you thought about me doing it…?”  
  
Hand in hand, toward the future. “Bet we could figure it out,” Bucky says, “Together.”


End file.
